But between the two of them, these pieces of “wearable art” created by Capital Region artist Anna VA Polesny in the early 1970s – and now on display at the Philadelphia Museum of Art -- contain a swirling, psychedelic explosion of symbols, images and references to the artist’s life and travels.

“There’s the skyline of New York. And my first car, a Volkswagen. . . and, from when I was in Egypt, the symbol for water,” said Polesny, who splits her time between Altamont and Northampton, Mass. Embroidered in the pieces are butterflies, flowers, a galloping horse. A rooster. A toothy, red-lipped grin. Even the letters “BPE,” referring to the “behavior, person, environment” paradigm devised by 1930s psychologist Kurt Lewin – a nod to Polesny’s days as a psychology student at the University at Albany.

On display in Philadelphia through May 17, 2020, “Off the Wall: American Art to Wear” includes more than 100 pieces by more than 50 artists, most of them amassed – Polesny’s included -- by New York City gallerist, collector and author Julie Schafler Dale. The exhibit showcases the Denim Art and Wearable Art movements of the 1960s and 1970s, a time when everyday garments became vehicles for ingenuity.

Heavily populated by women as modern feminism took hold, the wearable-art wave became, Polesny says, the closest thing the art world came to a women’s movement. It also sparked a revolution in the fashion industry, freeing it from rigid confines and encouraging individual expression.

In the early to mid-1960s, she said, “Suddenly denim became very popular.” Young people at the time “started, I think, defining themselves by decorating the denim in ways that were interesting to them – and as a way of rebelling, too.”

Not so much in her case, she added: As an immigrant, her aim was assimilation, not rebellion. Polesny was a child when her family fled communist Czechoslovakia after World War II, landing first in West German refugee camps and later Pakistan before settling in New York. In 1962, she graduated from Niskayuna High School; her home in Altamont is the house her parents built in the late 1960s.

She learned to embroider in an Irish convent school in West Pakistan, she said. As a master’s student at UAlbany, she did it to keep her hands busy. Traveling one summer in Mexico, supplies caught her eye at a market. With her was a pair of shorts a friend had given her. It had a hole. Polesny patched it with an embroidered butterfly, then kept right on going.

So began Polesny’s wide array of wearable art works -- some of them, by now, peripatetic veterans of multiple exhibits. “Courtesy of Levi Strauss, the shorts are very well traveled,” she said. As for the jacket, “I lent it to Levi Strauss and let them photograph it as they saw fit.” Decades later, she finally saw Sam Haskins’ shot of a woman wearing the jacket -- hair flung back, elbows wide, her unclothed derriere facing the camera.

Polesny wasn’t scandalized. “It’s a beautiful photo.” Regarding wearable art in general, she said, “Not only is it visually exciting and stimulating, everyone can relate to the human figure. You know, there are nudes in museums” – for instance, the Renoir exhibit at the Clark Art Institute in nearby Williamstown. “But this is clothing.”

And everyone knows clothing. “You don’t have to go around saying, ‘Now, what does that mean? What were they thinking?’ A lot of exhibitions, they’re thought-provoking, but they’re also very hard to pin down. But this will be easy to understand and relate to.”

Although Polesny hasn’t yet seen the exhibit, she expects it will evoke the spirit of cultural reinvention and social change that blasted hidebound conventions of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Back in the era of “Mad Men,” she said, “Clothing was pretty much prescribed. . . . There was an expectation how people would dress.” Men wore suits and ties – the “business uniform.” In school, girls wore skirts, boys wore pants, and that was about it. “And oh, my goodness gosh, women started wearing pants in the early to mid-60s,” she said.

“And I remember, once, a friend taking me to a very fancy restaurant in New York, and there was a couple in front of us, and the woman had a pant suit on – and she was told that she could not go in there in a pantsuit. And she took her pants off and went in with her jacket on.”

The restaurant allowed her inside? “Well, they did,” Polesny confirmed. “It was a longish jacket.”

Amy Biancolli was born in Queens, grew up in Connecticut and holds degrees from Hamilton College and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. A former movie critic for the Houston Chronicle, she first wrote for the TU from 1991-2000 and bounced back into the local-arts beat in 2012. She's published three books so far: "Figuring S--- Out: Love, Laughter, Suicide, and Survival"; "House of Holy Fools: A Family Portrait in Six Cracked Parts"; and "Fritz Kreisler: Love's Sorrow, Love's Joy." When she isn't consuming the arts or writing about them, she's fiddling around with the violin in a couple of bands, among them the gypsy-jazz group Hot Tuesday.